Apostles of Modernity: American Writers in the Age of Development

2. The "Skin Game": Du Bois, Wright, Malcom X, Baldwin

 Few Americans have looked at an Asian or African country without reflecting (and commenting) on the favorable effect a little American ambition would have. —John Kenneth Galbraith, Economic Development (1964) In a 1915 Atlantic Monthly essay, “The African Roots of War,” W. E. B. DuBoisappliedaprescientlyglobalizedanalysistothecapitalistexploitation of Africa: “The present world war is,then,the result of jealousies engendered by the recent rise of armed national associations of labor and capital whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world mainly outside the European circle of nations.”1 That is, colonialist rivalries fed the fires before the First World War; the European con- flict represented the return of international rivalries to the metropolitan center. Although he would later inflect this analysis, Du Bois remained a keen advocate of a materialist internationalism that saw colonial expansion as the key to modern turmoil. In this chapter I chart how this African American understanding of colonialism, repeatedly modulated in the face of historical change, created genealogies of analysis. Examining Du Bois, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin intertextually, one sees how literary internationalism evolves across and between writers, The “Skin Game” Du Bois, Wright, Malcolm X, Baldwin 2 28  The “Skin Game” as an intellectual dialogue develops across decades. These writers did not always agree with one another, but their disagreements of political analysis create a compelling narrative. I suggest that African American internationalism forged an analysis of empire that has few parallels.The strength of this dissenting analysis lies in a historical longevity reaching back to the early twentieth century. Alain Locke,for instance,had argued in1914 that imperialism caused the war.2 A recent discovery in Locke scholarship has also been a series of 1916 lectures at Howard University exploring racial difference in an international context. As Jeffrey Stewart notes in an introduction to this milestone in the African American critique of empire: “For Locke modern races resulted from the praxis of modern imperialism, which defined as ‘inferior’ those races such as Arabs, Africans, East Indians, and African Americans who were unable to free themselves from colonial subordination.Even those peoples such as African Americans who were not directly subject to an empire were subjected to the imperial attitude on the part of Anglo-Americans.”3 After the United States entered the Second World War Du Bois continued to develop his materialist globalism. In “The Realities in Africa: European Profit or Negro Development” (1943) he declared that “the primary reality of imperialism in Africa today is economic” (note Du Bois’s very specific usage of the term “Negro Development” to oppose “European Profit”). It’s worth quoting an extended passage of this internationalist critique: The fact is that so far as government investment is concerned, the money which Great Britain, France, Portugal and Germany as governments have invested in Africa has yielded small returns in taxes and revenues.But this governmental investment and its concomitant political control have been the basis upon which private investors have built their private empires, being thus furnished free capital by home taxation; and while the mass of people in the mother country have been taxed and often heavily for this governmental gift abroad, the private capitalist who has invested in the colonies has reaped not only interest from his own investment but returns from investments The “Skin Game”  29 which he did not make and which are protected by armies and navies which he only partially supported.Immense sums have been derived from raw material and labor whose price has been depressed to a minimum while the resulting goods processed in the mother country are sold at monopoly prices. The profits have not been evenly distributed at home; but the net return to the white races for their investment in colored labor and raw material in Africa has been immense . That, very briefly, is the fundamental fact of the situation which confronts us in Africa today.4 Du Bois counters the argument that colonization has in some way been “good” for Africa. He also teases the paradox that the British government was expanding imperially while campaigning against slavery. Du Bois identifies what we might now call the synergies between private capital and governmental action: “The slave trade and slavery would not only be unnecessary; they were actually a handicap to profitable investment.”5 So the Western government creates networks (of “political control,” of...